Listening to Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer, this morning talk of the state of play, it was impossible to expunge the slippery image of Mr Vholes from one’s mind.

Dickens published Bleak House through 1852/53 and in it gave voice to his dismay at the wanton, excruciatingly self-serving legal processes which grind away at the little man. Mr Vholes claims to his naïve client that the wheels are turning when the bleak truth is that nothing ever happens in Jarndyce. 

Has politics ever been more interesting than at this moment? The atrophy seeping through both major parties has sheered off individual members of each, frustrated by the absence of moral authority, leadership, vision and compassion.

Mr Hammond spoke words which appeared to lack content: or purpose, or even direction. He didn’t sound as though he was expecting to convince the audience in light of he himself being sceptical of where, as a Party, the Tories are headed.

Bleak times indeed, particularly as the stakes simply couldn’t be higher.

All that was drafted on 21.ii.19: inertia prevented its posting. Since then, countless others appear to take up the Vholes baton. But last evening, while gliding from shower to wardrobe, I caught Matt Thorne sharing that idea of Jarndyce & Jarndyce skinship with Brexit.

On the day the Disunited Kingdom was to have sheared itself off, the week also heard a perfectly rational explanation for the mess. Alas, I forget which broadcast it was but a journalist (?) rather thought the zeal with which the PM has driven forward Britain’s exit is a function of her dismay at the decision these isles made.

I wonder if we haven’t all been thinking that but it is the first time I’ve heard it uttered.

And that was written on 29.iii.19. 

Lithograph in forthcoming BM exhibition Edvard Munch: The Scream

Neither was posted: it seems trivial to point out what stares us in the face.

But self-control evaporated yesterday when Jeremy Hunt actually said on the radio news that the wheels are turning.  Positive proof, were it needed, that nothing ever happens in Brexit.

The British Museum opens an exhibition Edvard Munch love and angst on 11.iv.19